Tech | The year’s top stockpickers

Uncertainty hung over the telecommunications industry at the start of 2013, with the prospect of a looming federal election and its potential effects on the national broadband network.

But a bullish strategy for some equities analysts has paid off this year as the biggest telco stocks skyrocketed to record highs.

They certainly benefited
Mark Goodridge
of Morgan Stanley, who was named Thomson Reuters StarMine’s top stockpicker for the year after yielding an 18.3 per cent return over industry benchmarks.

His continued “buy" recommendation on
TPG Telecom
proved the most fruitful, as the company’s organic customer growth, record profits and aggressive bundling strategy saw the stock climb from $2.55 to $4.80 over the year.

Close competitor
iiNet
was another strong performance, making similarly record profits and swooping in on Telstra’s failed bid for small Adelaide telco Adam Internet.

Both picks also benefited Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s David Kaynes who, with a 12.5 per cent return on benchmarks, scored second to top picker for technology and telco, and ninth overall in the StarMine awards.

“The swing factor for those stocks was going to be how are they going to look in the future, and that really came down what was the NBN going to look like, what’s its price going to be," Mr Kaynes said. “Despite the uncertainty, we were reasonably confident that they would both be quite solid competitors in an NBN environment."

But Mr Kaynes’ best picks were in online classifieds, with profitable buy recommendations for
REA Group
and
Carsales.com
yielding 41 per cent and 30 per cent above industry benchmarks, respectively.